Star Wars: The Best of PC announced

Five great adventures collected in $40 package

Usually when publishers release collections of their older games, they're either seriously outdated or were mediocre when they first hit. Not so with Star Wars: The Best of PC. This collection, just announced by publisher LucasArts and due to hit store shelves sometime next week, will bundle together five relatively new, well-received Star Wars games: Empire at War, Battlefront, Knights of the Old Republic, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Republic Commando.

For those who missed them the first time, here's what to expect. Empire at War, released early this year as a stand-alone game, is a 3D real-time strategy game that enables players to freely wage war across the galaxy as either the Rebellion or the Empire. It's fairly unique In that players can actually fight battles simultaneously on the ground and in space, with orbital bombardments taking devastating tolls on ground troops. And as an added bonus, Empire players can eventually build the Death Star and simply blow up battlefields rather than fight for them.

Above: Star Wars: Empire at War is included in the Best of PC collection.

Knights of the Old Republic, on the other hand, is an epic RPG set thousands of years before the Star Wars films, while Jedi Outcast is a Jedi-themed, first-personshooter that takes place a few years after them. Battlefront is an all-out, team-based, vehicle heavy first-and-third-personshooter that tackles battles from the films, and Republic Commando is a squad-based first-person shooter that tells the story of a unit of four highly specialized clone soldiers. So, yeah - lots of shooting. But it's great stuff.

In addition to those five games, all of which are stellar, The Best of PC packs in a 14-day trial for the Star Wars Galaxies massively multiplayer game. Sounds like a pretty solid value to us.